


The Black Marble Clergyman

by Random_ag



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Graphic Description, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mild Gore, Pre-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, for what? who knows, sorta?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23664043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_ag/pseuds/Random_ag
Summary: With his hands joined at the height of his knee, his back arched, his vacant stare filled with fear, it didn't look like he was playing a part.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	The Black Marble Clergyman

“Have you ever wanted to hurt yourself?”

There was dead silence.

Joey stared in front of himself without blinking. He had a painfully concentrated expression on his face; his unhealthy skin had seemed to vanish, his features opening like a lid, a mask, a boiler’s cover to show a pulsing, fleshy, excruciating anxiety screaming in the shape of shaking veins and twitching muscles.

“Wanted to see yourself bleed?”

His leg bounced incessantly to the point of hurting. Nobody could claim to have seen it there, for it wasn’t real, but they all knew that something black and convulsing pressed angrily in his chest, half lodged in his ribcage and perilously close to his heart, trying to get under the outmost layer of his skin to wriggle between his organs.

“There needs to be a way I can get this out.”

His nails seemed to pierce his palm; they seemed to dig into the bone, into the marrow, into the bits of soul trapped within it.

“To atone.”

A hand passed over his shoulder gently, and his neck bent mindlessly to avoid it.

“Mr. Drew?”

He blinked twice: Jack looked at him from beside, his bushy brows furrowed in worried apprehension.

“Is something the matter?”

His family would go to church every sunday when he was little, but they stopped bringing him with them when he got too agitated for the other worshippers.

The pastor was a horrifying man, although he couldn’t remember a single thing about him past the black clegyman robes. He remembered his body looking like a distorted rectangle in his black jacket, swaying back and forth without a head (he was bald in an almost grottesque way, nothing like Jack: where the lyricist had a head, the pastor had a horrendous pale pumpkin which had been dropped one too many times) as he spoke of examples for the boys and girls to forget.

When he’s learned of how people would resolve to flogging during the plagues (to atone for their sins, to ask for forgiveness, to beg for the pain and anguish to stop by spreading their blood and laments through the land in the name of God) he’d thought back to the pastor, to his flailing rectangular arms distorting while his body swayed slowly but harshly as he cried out his sermon.

He couldn’t remember if he’d ever talked about self-inflicted flagellation.

It had gotten stuck within him anyways.

Was he searching comfort, when he was young, by trying to speak to demons? Did he think they would shield him from the violent answer to his fears and insecurities Christianity had left in his psyche never to be removed?

The cartoon pastor was headless, giant, a pendulum of pure black. He would hit himself with a steel ruler when he’d make a mistake, when he’d be tricked.

He’d come up with him. He’d gotten too scared to him.

He could never give it life.

“No. No, it’s ok.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was just a bit. Just a bit. I was just playing a lunatic.”

“Sir-”

“I wouldn’t have the guts to anyways.”


End file.
